Hugh Gundlach

Gundlach on the ABC

Research impact: What I Learned From Being An ABC Media Expert For Two Weeks

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The ABC’s TOP 5 is a unique program where the national broadcaster works with a group of early career researchers across science, humanities and the arts. This year, the University of Melbourne’s Hugh Gundlach was one of the Humanities TOP5. He specialises in education, particularly in teacher retention and teachers’ work.

Amplifying your Research Impact through the Media

As academic researchers, we have a responsibility to share our findings beyond just peer-reviewed journals. The public and industry funds much of our work, so we should return that knowledge to its context by providing expert opinion supported by facts and evidence. Apart from helping attract funding and building profiles inside and outside institutions, media exposure allows us to start conversations in society and elevate stories beyond headlines.

I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) as part of their Top 5 Media Residency program. During this time, I learned how to retain the integrity of complex research while presenting it to a broader, non-academic media audience. I believe we can all benefit from the insights offered by this program.

Why Engage with the Media?

Media helps set and follow the public interest, but it can also fall prey to sensationalism and PR agendas. Academics can play a key role in elevating stories, providing context, and reducing sensationalism. Most people will never read a peer-reviewed journal, making the media an essential platform for reaching diverse and influential audiences, including policymakers, highly educated audiences, and the general public.

Media also allows academics to incorporate personal stories and case studies, elements typically absent from formal research outputs.

Storytelling is Key

The purpose of news media is to serve the public interest by exposing injustice, informing the population, but also entertaining. The ABC prides itself on sharing good stories, well told, without dumbing them down. They carefully consider who the audience is for each program, repeatedly asking why that audience should care about the content.

Good media coverage is fundamentally about storytelling. The ABC focuses on big issues told through engaging, human-centred stories. Ask yourself:

  • Does your research connect with any current societal issues?
  • Can you offer a fresh perspective on something in the news?
  • What part of your work will make people say, “Wow”?
  • What’s the one takeaway for the audience?

Use vivid language and imagery to bring your research to life.

Which Media Formats Should I Consider?

Being behind the scenes at the ABC helped me understand the range of media formats. Each requires a different approach:

Online Articles

Online articles offer features, opinion pieces, explainers and analysis. They need to be timely, impactful, locally relevant, surprising, containing conflict/tension, human interest and universal themes.

Articles are around 1,000 words with succinct  one sentence paragraphs, lots of subheadings, and engaging images every scroll. Most are read on phones, with an average two minute read time. High performers attract about 20,000 views with an average 4 minute read time.

Focus on making one key point very well. Use impactful quotes from other work, hyperlinking sources after the first three paragraphs to avoid sending readers away initially. 

Radio

People listen to radio news and talk programs to gain knowledge, hear stories of shared interest, and get help with their lives. As a guest, be passionate but remember it’s not for you – keep the conversation flowing without drifting off-topic. Find the human interest angle and use sensory details to create a narrative flow for the imagined listener of that program.

You may be brought in as an expert to provide context and perspective behind the headlines on live breakfast, afternoon or drivetime shows. Or you might pre-record an interview for a more specialised subject-based program, where you can tell richer stories and case studies in a friendly, informal environment.

Podcasts

Podcasts are even more niche, with segmented audiences actively seeking out that specific content. Listen to past episodes to understand the particular style – it could be a casual host chat, long-form interview, high production narrative or a daily news-style briefing. Whatever the format, your interviewing ability is key.

Types of Interviews

Interviews are guided conversations aimed at informing, discovering new insights, or holding someone accountable. For researchers, interviews are usually of the first two types.

Before agreeing to an interview, ask the journalist/producer who the audience is, what angle they’re taking, what areas they want to cover and who else they’re speaking to. It’s acceptable to decline interviews if you don’t feel qualified or confident in the treatment of the topic.

The producer will likely pre-interview you to prepare questions for the talent to ask. But the talent may still ask stereotypical questions the public is expecting – remember, the audience should be getting the most out of it. 

In an interview, answer the question you’re asked, not the one you’ve prepared for. Keep your language accessible, contextualise any statistics, and maintain a conversational tone. Try to answer questions as a fellow human, not just an academic!

How to Pitch Your Research

Producers are the gatekeepers for most media appearances. When pitching, be specific and personal—show them how your content aligns with their audience. Timing is critical. Reach out before 9 am and avoid Fridays.

Tailoring your pitch to relevant holidays or major events (e.g., ‘Back to school’, Exams, the Olympics, NAPLAN) can improve your chances. Be mindful of when Parliament is not sitting, as those weeks can create more opportunities for academic voices to be heard.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t hear back immediately—media work often involves getting “bumped” or edited out. The key is to remain persistent, relevant and to make yourself known. Write articles for platforms like EduResearchMatters, The Guardian, or The Conversation, update your profile on your institution’s website, and connect with journalists covering your area of expertise, as well as any media teams within your institution.

Engaging with the media offers a valuable opportunity to share your research with a wider audience. By telling your story clearly and compellingly, you can contribute to important conversations, elevate public discourse, and make a lasting impact beyond academia.

Hugh Gundlach is a lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Education at The University of Melbourne. He is one of the ABC Top 5 Media Residents (Humanities) for 2024. There are intakes for the ABC Top 5 in the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. Early career researchers are encouraged to apply in 2025.

How research-based news articles (like this one) accelerate research impact

Fight! How video games can power up learning now

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Video games are a dominant form of entertainment, consistently outselling books, film, and music combined. How can education learn from their addictive design?

Great games and great learning share attributes of experiences that challenge us through a variety of immersive problem solving, decision-making and strategic activities.

Video games tap into supportive internal factors of learning such as engaged and positive emotional states, immediate feedback, interval learning and input quantity (or ‘chunking’).

It’s super effective! (For learning)

The success of video games in facilitating learning lies in their intuitive, pleasant design, engaging narratives, and addictive, rewarding feedback loops. Research indicates that video games can improve perception, memory and knowledge retention.

Though video games may be studied as texts , we are focusing here on incorporating game-inspired elements into teaching methodologies to enhance both learning outcomes and student enjoyment. By leveraging the intuitive and self-directed nature of gaming, educators can make learning addictive and engaging across various subjects.

Gamification vs games-based learning. Fight!

Incorporating game elements into education can take two primary forms. Both approaches can enhance the learning experience by adding elements to lesson content such as risk and excitement, urgency, pleasure, and status.

Gamification pervades our lives in everyday things such as loyalty program points, fitness apps, productivity performance targets, Uber ratings, social media metrics and dating apps. Gamification in education involves integrating game mechanics, such as points, badges, achievements, awards or rankings to the classroom, while game-based learning uses actual games as the primary teaching tool . Here, we are more focused here on game design than using games per se.

via GIPHY

“It’s-a-me, Mario!”

Effective game design is crucial for facilitating learning through gameplay. Games with visually pleasing designs, engaging narratives, and addictive gameplay mechanics tend to be more successful in capturing learners’ attention and promoting active, enjoyable participation.

Engineer Mark Rober outlined how a game design approach, what he calls the “Super Mario effect ” can encourage participation in learning activities where it otherwise would not be evident. 

By situating repeated, instant feedback for error correction in a dynamic narrative or context where there is a freedom to fail, gamers learn from failure, try alternate strategies, and develop their skills at their own pace until they succeed.

Design is crucial to this process, and there is even a New York school that has based its philosophy on the principle of video game design.

Achievement unlocked

Video games excel in setting challenging goals and providing clear objectives for players to achieve. The sense of accomplishment and progression inherent in games motivates players to overcome obstacles and master new skills.

Educators can adopt similar strategies to set challenging yet achievable goals for students, fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation in their learning journey.

Emphasising effort, progress, and continuous improvement fosters a sense of agency and ownership in learning.

Advocates of game-based design have recognised that games prove students are quite capable of memorising and recalling immense volumes of knowledge, when it is constructed by them and founded in experience.

Pokémon players famously memorise more than 27,000 values in three dimensions when battling hundreds of character iterations. By contrast, the entire periodic table has 118 elements and there are approximately 200 irregular verb forms in English.

While students may want to hide their effort and achievements, gamers proudly share their status, achievements and even how long it has taken. In Mortal Kombat, one achievement requires winning 2,800 matches, playing more than 670 hours. To obtain the Pure Poker achievement in Pure Hold’em takes about 10,000 hours.

One has to respect the time and effort gamers dedicate to their craft. Gamers are willing to dedicate and invest time into seemingly repetitive and mundane levels or challenges, showing a persistence and resilience that we would envy in education. Some gamers even modify their games or set challenges to make them even more difficult  than the developers intended, such as speedruns or completing games using only one button!

Games are ‘eustressful’, a beneficial form of stress somewhere between fun and scary, that is motivational.

How can education manage this balance? Measuring progress rather than purely achievement could be key.

“Save progress?”

Games offer tangible feedback on players’ progress through various metrics such as scores, levels, and achievements. Similarly, educators can implement assessment methods that provide meaningful feedback and recognize students’ growth and achievements. Emphasising progress  over final scores encourages continuous improvement and resilience in learning. ATAR, take note! 

The Legend of Zelda was one of the very first games to offer saving. In education, resubmitting a task for a better grade and measuring improvement rather than pure achievement is an example of offering the equivalent of save points for assessments. Could a student’s response to teacher feedback be considered as well as the achievement itself?

Compared to many games of the 80s and 90s where a player had only a few ‘lives’ to survive the whole game, modern first-person shooters such as HALO and the Lego series of games provide more generous opportunities to make progress and complete levels, rewarding persistence and removing a punishment for failure. Where once, players may have merely given up when reaching a level or ‘boss’ that was too difficult, modern games allow players to eventually progress. When learners are not as worried about how they fare relative to everyone else, they focus on their own game.

“Select your difficulty”

Games often offer adjustable difficulty levels to accommodate players with varying skill levels and preferences. The 1977 Atari is credited as one of the first video game consoles to offer selection of difficulty.

Nintendo intentionally made Disney’s The Lion King and Aladdin games difficult so that gamers would have to rent the game longer from the video store!

Games showcase a stellar array of ways to increase challenge in differentiated ways. They can add more enemies, more difficult or faster enemies, more complexity, reduced health or time to complete the same challenge, and even adaptive intelligence enemies.

Moving away from kill counts and mindless shooting, first person shooter action games such as the James Bond franchise and Metal Gear Solid have innovated with objectives related to time, stealth, lives lost, civilians saved, accuracy, ammunition saved and even style.

Similarly, educators can personalise learning experiences to meet the diverse needs of students by offering differentiated instruction and support. By providing opportunities for students to challenge themselves while maintaining a supportive learning environment, educators can foster a sense of competence, growth and autonomy in their students.

“Game over. Play again?”

Often based in an immersive world or context, in games there is a clear sense of objective made meaningful by a narrative  and the presentation of a pathway towards a goal. The map views of SuperMario, Donkey Kong Country and Candy Crush are exemplary examples of how to establish a sense of journey and incremental challenge, which promote mastery and replayability.

By embracing game-inspired elements such as dynamic feedback, meaningful challenges, and personalised learning pathways, educators can empower students to become active participants in their learning journey.

Video games offer valuable insights into effective learning strategies that educators can leverage to create engaging and immersive learning experiences.

Dr Hugh Gundlach is a lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne. He teaches in the Master of Teaching (Secondary) and is the Commerce Coordinator.

how leaders run meetings

Leaders: Could we please just get this done quickly?

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Educators across all sectors are pressed for time. Here’s how we can manage one constant drain on our attention. Leaders: Make meetings meaningful.

How many meetings have you attended that you can truly say were a productive use of everyone’s time and achieved their purpose?

How many meetings have you run yourself that achieved their purpose? Would the attendees agree?

Most meetings follow a traditional format that hasn’t evolved with the modern workplace. But fear not, a few simple tweaks to your meeting style can lead to more productive gatherings.

Meeting frustrations for attendees 

You’ve probably heard these common frustrations about meetings:

  • “We didn’t need this meeting.”
  • “This could have been an email.”
  • “The decisions were already made.”
  • “Nothing will come of this.”
  • “This is so boring.”
  • “Why bother coming on time?”
  • “Why does it have to be scheduled now?”
  • “We’re just going over the same points.”
  • “Why don’t we just put it to a vote, then?”
  • “Won’t that person just pipe down?!”

Several of these issues can be resolved by asking:  Is a meeting really necessary?

Alternatives to meetings

Leaders should consider alternatives like delegation, mentoring, workshops, or one-on-one conversations with team members. The use of technology for asynchronous interaction such as focused email threads, chat programs, surveys, shared documents, rosters and graphic organisers can allow team members time to think and participate at a time of their choosing and to their desired extent of participation. 

Is the meeting happening just because it’s on the calendar? Some managers hold meetings simply because it’s the norm or because they find it easier than other forms of managing or delegating. However, a meeting should never be an end in itself. Meetings are not suited for disseminating large amounts of information or reporting without the opportunity for team discussion. The meeting must have a clear purpose and achieve its objectives.

The best meeting objectives are 

1. To generate ideas, 

2. To make a group decision, and 

3. to share sensitive or urgent information. 

Meeting frustrations for leaders

As a leader, you may have faced issues such as poorly allocated meeting places and times, directions to deliver someone else’s bad news or frustrations with attendees. 

Sluggish, unprepared, dominant, missing, or late attendees can make meeting discussions off-topic, irrelevant, or impossible! Perhaps the worst outcomes of such meetings are the a reversal of the decision afterward, a need to have another meeting, or the “real” meeting happening elsewhere.

Small changes for a big difference in meetings

First and foremost, it’s essential to recognize that a meeting belongs to the entire team, not just the leader or chair. The true measure of a meeting’s success lies in its outcomes, not in how smoothly it ran. It’s a democratic process that encourages free discussion, values diverse opinions, and ensures decisions are made thoughtfully. Encourage all team members to actively participate and discourage rushing to decisions or stifling opposing viewpoints. One major change to make is for the leader to abdicate from the Chair position..

Leaders, sit back and watch

The role of the chair is critical in maintaining an efficient meeting. While chairs hold authority, they should refrain from advocating a particular interest. Their objective should be impartial management of time and speakers, ensuring  the meeting stays on course. The chair must encourage free discussion while maintaining control, using various cues such as tone, questions, and body language.

When it comes to choosing a chair, it’s important to find someone who can manage the meeting objectively and encourage open discussion. The chair shouldn’t be overly involved in decision-making or introduce decisions that have already been made. Sitting back while the team discusses an issue allows the leader to come through at the end and make the decision, rather than informing the team of a decision already made, or asking for approval of their idea, which can make questions and ideas from the team seem like criticism.

And don’t be secretary either!

Ideally, the leader should not be chair, or secretary. Minutes should capture the essence of the team discussion, objectively recording who said what, not just the final decisions. Technology can aid in this process, allowing attendees to follow the flow of conversation with projector or whiteboard notes. This can also help quell the repetition of arguments, especially from the same person. Use action items to track decisions made and to follow up previous meetings’ items.

The power of a well-structured agenda

Agenda items are best framed as questions, with each having a designated time estimate in minutes, not clock time. Start with important items that require brainstorming or debate, and save routine matters for the end, or via email. Apply time limits for speakers, announced by the chair or displayed on a screen or clock, to keep speaking time fair and focused. Encourage a culture of meeting preparation by getting straight to the issue and not repeating information that was required reading.

A meeting agenda should establish context, provide a stimulus, allow interaction and idea-sharing, produce tangible outcomes, measure accountability against objectives, and encourage reflection and action steps.

Final tips

To best generate ideas and to make a decision as a group, it is crucial to create an environment where alternatives can be raised and discussed with the right thinking frame and time before criticism is allowed. Using De Bono’s thinking hats, even if informally through a competent meeting Chair, will encourage the team to genuinely contribute. Establishing criteria before a decision is made should help focus contributions to the issue at hand rather than personal standpoints. Asking one or more members of the team to adopt a Devil’s Advocate position is an equally valuable initiative which prevents groupthink. 

Incorporate these strategies, and your meetings can become a more productive use of your team’s time, knowledge and ideas. Next time you gather your team, consider these best practices to make your meetings more efficient and effective.

Dr Hugh Gundlach is a lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne. He recently presented this content at the ACEL National Conference in Brisbane as one of the 2023 ACEL New Voices in Educational Leadership Research. He likes meetings that stay on topic, produce outcomes, run to time, and that have chocolate biscuits.